Sorting event pages by date [SOLVED]

[Smoo]

Hi folks.
Newbie here - on PW for a couple of weeks now (I've been a Drupal developer for over 10 years).

I've created a template for a Meeting and Event item, which has a title, description and date (a Unix timestamp, called "meeting_event_date").
I also have two templates for displaying lists of these things, one more or less full page and the other as a small block with reduced content to be placed on other pages.

So far so good - I can get all the Events pages using $meeting_events = $pages->find("template=meetingevent");
Then I use a foreach to walk $meeting_events and pull out the date, title and description of each event, wrapping them in my markup as I go.

The trouble is they're coming in in date-created order (based on the metadata of the Events pages, I guess) whereas I'd prefer to be able to sort them by the actual Event date (which is a field on the Event).

I could of course pull the Events from $meetings-events apart and push the individual events into an intermediary array, sort that by the timestamp value, and then walk it to pull out the data into my markup, but I can't help feeling there's a better way. Is there a way to sort the $meetings_events array before running the foreach?

I've tried $meeting_events->sort("meeting_event_date");  but that's having no effect.

UPDATE - just needed to wait for the template to re-compile. Apparently that's not instantaneous...? I still need to understand caching in this environment.
The sort() method above worked. Leaving this here in case it helps someone else.

[SamC]

I sort on my site straight inside the selector by field 'postDate' which is a datetime field:

<?php
  $entries = $pages->find("template=blog-entry, sort=-postDate");
?>

 

[Smoo]

Well that's tidier - thanks. What does the - flag before the field name do?

[SamC]

9 minutes ago, Smoo said:

Well that's tidier - thanks. What does the - flag before the field name do?

Hi @Smoo and welcome to the forum btw   (if I haven't done that already in another post?!)

The '-' sorts them ascending or descending. In this case, it's newest first.

[Smoo]

Got it.
Thanks - this community thus far has been quite pleasant and welcoming.
Cheers